The speed limit at the crash bend is 49mph. All 13 carriages were catapulted into the air but amazingly both Garzon and his co-driver survived with minor injuries.

A further 63 people, including one Brit and several Americans, were also treated in hospital.

Many of the passengers were pilgrims heading for a religious festival at Santiago de Compostela in north west Spain.

Last night it emerged Garzon had previously posted a picture on Facebook of a train speedometer showing 124mph.

Alongside the image, published in March last year, he wrote: “What joy it would be to get level with the police and then go past them making their speed guns go off. Ha ha!”

The offending Facebook page was taken down after it appeared on Spanish TV yesterday, as the nation mourned its worst rail accident for 70 years.

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Tourist Lidia Cannon, who was visiting the Santiago de Compostela for the festival said: “We heard a big bang, like, we thought it was an air crash, I thought it was a car crash, other people thought it was a bomb.

“It was very, very loud, the noise. A man was asking for his wife and his wife was inside – dead.

“A boy was looking for his girlfriend and she was inside the train – dead. I saw a woman who had lost one foot – but instead of crying or shouting or whatever because of the pain she was looking very, very serious. She was in shock.”

Linda said the grim sight was too much for some.

She said: “One man couldn’t cope with it. He was taking out people that had mobile phones in their pockets ringing all the time. Policemen and doctors and everyone was crying and he had to leave.”

Passengers who managed to escape the smashed carriages told of the horrific scenes inside after the carriages came to a halt.

Ricardo Montesco said: “A lot of people were squashed at the bottom. We tried to squeeze out of the wagons and we realised the train was burning.

“I was in the second wagon and there was fire…I saw corpses.

“It was going so quickly.?.?. it seems that on a curve the train started to twist, and the carriages piled up one on top of the other.”

Oscar Mateo said he saw passengers thrown to the floor, then tossed from one side of the train to the other.

He said: “Help came in five minutes, but that time became an eternity. I helped people with broken legs and bruises get out.”

The Class 730 train was travelling from Madrid to the city of Ferrol in Galicia.

It had 218 passengers aboard and was nearing the end of a six-hour trip when it derailed near Santiago at 8.41pm on Wednesday.

Three carriages burst into flames and rescue workers toiled through the night to try to reach survivors.

Julio Gomez Pomar, president of Spain’s national railway firm RENFE, said Garzon had been operating trains on the line for more than a year.

He added that the crash train had no technical problems. He said: “It had passed an inspection that morning. Those trains are inspected every 7500km. Its maintenance record was perfect.”

Accident investigators are now analysing the train’s data recording black box which has been handed over to the judge leading the investigation.

Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy, who was born in Santiago de Compostela, immediately ordered three days of official mourning.

Professor Roger Kemp, of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: “The big question is why the train was running at more than twice the speed limit.

“As the driver was leaving the high-speed line to join a much slower route, there must have been at least prominent visual warnings to reduce speed.”